Page 23

He leads me deeper into the safe room, past the threshold where the air changes—cooler, stiller, the kind of air that hasn't moved in years and doesn't intend to—and into the main room where my mother's life lives in boxes, and flat file drawers, and stacked prints that go back further than my memory does.

The old safe sits against the far wall like a monument, iron-flanked and patient, and I have stood in this room a hundred times in my life and never once felt afraid of it until now.

The shelves crowd in on both sides. Negative sleeves, and contact sheets, and archival boxes labeled in my mother's precise handwriting. Her whole empire, reduced to cardboard and silver halide in a room that smells like old paper and the loneliness of things no one is looking at anymore.

He points to one of the wingback chairs. "There, darling. You're going to sit down right there."

And I do.

I'm so far inside my own head, so tangled up in the fear, and the wrongness, and the desperate, scrambling effort to understand what is actually happening here, that my body just goes ahead and makes the polite choice without consulting me.

I walk to the chair.

I sit.

My hands find my lap automatically, my knees come together the way Miss Patricia drilled into us at twelve years old at school, posture is presence, Savannah, presence is power, and I stare straight ahead like a girl who was raised to look composed even when she is anything but.

Marcus stands six feet away with one hand propped under his chin, studyin' me like he's thinking very hard about something. His suit is perfect, his watch is expensive, his jawline is impeccable. He's handsome, there's no way to deny it.

But the ugliness of him is so… there. So present, the only thing I feel is revulsion.

He taps his chin with one finger, slow and deliberate, like the gesture itself is a performance for an audience only he can see. Then he smiles. "I'm searching for the word. Bear with me for a moment."

I have lost the whole thread of this. I am sittin' here in a wingback chair with my knees together, and my hands in my lap, and my spine perfectly straight, and I have absolutely no idea what he is talking about.

My mind is still catchin' up to the photos on the wall—to my blue ribbon at six, to my wildflower crown at twelve, to the quality of afternoon light in a picture my mother took on a Tuesday that I don't even remember—and Marcus is standin' in front of me tapping his chin and searching for a word like we're playing a parlor game.

"Ah!" And his eyes do light up. They genuinely light up, and that alone is enough to make my skin feel wrong on my body. "Boudoir."

He says it like a man opening a gift. Then he says it again, slower, like maybe I didn't catch it the first time, like he wants to watch me hear it twice.

"Boudoir. That's what they're called. The bedroom shoot." He chuckles at that, low and self-satisfied. "She left those out, I think. On purpose. She wanted to torment me."

I am shaking my head. I can feel myself doing it—small, involuntary, the kind of motion you make when a sentence doesn't resolve into anything sensible no matter how many times you run it through.

Why would a mother take boudoir photographs of her child? Why would those photographs exist at all, and why would they be here, and why is Marcus White Jr. talking about them like they belong to him in some way, like Eleanor's choices were a message written in his name?

What kind of arrogance does a man have to possess—what specific, breathtaking, architectural arrogance—to look at a mother's obsession with her own daughter and decide, in the cathedral of his own ego, that the whole thing was arranged around him?

"What the fuck are you talkin' about?"

It comes out before I can stop it. Involuntary, graceless, the words just—leave me, like something I cannot keep inside my body one moment longer.

Which makes him laugh. And not the practiced campaign-trail sound bite he produces for rooms full of donors and photographs. This is joy. Real, genuine, indelicate joy. Like my confusion is a gift he has been waiting all day to unwrap and he cannot believe how perfectly it has been presented to him.

"Ohhhh!" He draws the word out like he's savoring it, like he wants it to last. Then says it again, because apparently once isn't enough, because apparently he needs to hear the echo of his own delight before he can continue. "Oh! Oh, my God. My God, my God, my GOD!"

The laughter peaks, and settles, and he looks at me like I am the most extraordinary thing he has ever encountered in all his pampered, Georgetown-educated, senator's-son life.

"You don't know, do you?"

Know? Know what. I am running that back and it resolves into nothing. I am standin' in the middle of a sentence I cannot find the end of, and the room feels smaller than it did a moment ago, and I am not cold anymore, I am not anything, I am just—floating. Untethered. The way you go weightless in the half-second after a horse refuses a fence, and you're already airborne, and the ground is coming, and there is nothing left to do but brace.

Drownin', Savannah. You are absolutely drownin'.

"All those pictures she took of you, sweet-pea." He says it like he's settlin' into something warm and well-worn, like he's been waitin' a long time to say it out loud and the waiting only made it better. "The constant posting. Sometimes dozens a day. Do you have any idea why she did that, Savannah? Any idea at all why she was so compelled to parade you publicly?"

"I was her muse," I say.